The following is the first in a series of reviews of randomly selected, low-quality, made-for-TV Christmas movies. The most disconcerting element of the fictional universe of the 2011 ABC Family movie “12 Dates of Christmas”—the tale of a Manhattanite named […]
Category: Generation Y
Generation Y
Sorry not sorry
A full month has passed in which my minor obsession with Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” music video has not subsided; I suppose it may be time to come clean. Released on Oct. 22, 2015, the clip has so far notched only […]
Generation Y
Still not over it
I’ve just listened to Adele’s newly released album “25,” which a lot of people expect to be the bestselling album of 2015—which is the reason I listened to it, I guess, even though I don’t particularly care for Adele as […]
Generation Y
Ben Carson explains other historical monuments and landmarks
“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids in order to store grain. Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big—when you […]
Generation Y
The real Stephen Colbert
Remember when Stephen Colbert was really funny on Comedy Central for nine years while pretending to be an egotistical ignorant right-wing pundit, and then he announced that he was moving to CBS to take over the Letterman show but wouldn’t […]
Generation Y
Techie chic
It was nearly three years ago that the journalist Farhad Manjoo published the seminal Slate article “This Is the Greatest Hoodie Ever Made: How American Giant created the best sweatshirt known to man”—still surely the most influential and frequently cited […]
Generation Y
Hannah and “Lenny”
As an actual male fan of the writer/director/actress Lena Dunham, I subscribed to her new email newsletter—called “Lenny”—almost as soon as I heard about it. Dunham’s fame stems from having created the HBO program “Girls,” a critically acclaimed but only […]
Generation Y
Biking for beer
The apparent association between craft beer and cycling is one of the more perplexing aspects of microbrew culture. In my early 20s, I noticed that brewery gift shops seemed to sell a surprising number of cycling jerseys—from Allagash to Stone, […]
Generation Y
Vermont in Cinema: “What Lies Beneath”
The Oscar winner Robert Zemeckis put forth “What Lies Beneath” in the midst of Hollywood’s end-of-millennium resurgence of interest in ghost stories. This period began in 1999 with “The Sixth Sense,” “Stir of Echoes,” “The Haunting,” and “Sleepy Hollow,” and […]
Generation Y
Vermont in cinema: “Man with a Plan”
Movies are often based on true stories. When a true story is based on a fictional movie, it’s a somewhat more special circumstance. “Man with a Plan,” a 1996 independent mockumentary, is a special movie. Directed by John O’Brien, a […]